Mail

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     Forgot to post about mail earlier, something to do with trying to function
on 3-1/2 hours sleep... 

     This morning, a site "neopath.com", instead of just bouncing one copy
of a piece of mail that was undeliverable, bounced thousands, maybe even
millions.  The net result was that it totally filed up our mail spool. 

     When this happens, the local mail delivery agent keeps trying to
write the file and ends up creating a 540mb file of mostly holes for each
e-mail box it tries to append. 

     666 e-mail boxes were in this manner corrupted today (and having
taken e-mail to support from someone claiming to be Jesus Christ last
night I'm not sure what to make of this)... 

     Because people were trying to access their corrupted mailboxes from
eskimo, the result was that Eskimo is trying to read a 540mb file over the
network from mail, and given that both eskimo and mail are directly on the
FDDI backbone they are both capable of generating a large amount of
traffic and pretty much brought the local network to it's knees. 

     This in turn caused the web servers and ftp servers to break because
they couldn't communicate with eskimo, authentication failures happened
because things couldn't talk over the network which was being flooded by
traffic between mail and eskimo, etc. 

     I had to turn all of the mail programs off in order to prevent eskimo
from trying to access corrupted mail spools on mail until I could get them
all fixed.  This process took several hours. 

     I don't know why the mail program at neopath.com did what it did,
there were no clues in the bounced message.  I've written the admin of
that site who actually has an address at aa.net and placed router filters
blocking incoming mail from neopath.com until I find out what happened and
know that it has been corrected there. 

     Everything should be back to relatively normal, save for one users
mailbox here (mvgb) who was the recipient of all of these bounces that I
had to delete in order to get everything else back.